2. Introduction
2.7 Religion: Forerunner of Commercialised Slavery and Comparison of Slavery
2.7.3 The Essence of Islam and the Role of Muslims in Slavery and Slave
Inspired by a similar racial hatred, the Syrian Greek Monarch Antiochus IV killed thousands of Hebrews between 168 and 164 BC. Over the course of two centuries; the Romans massacred an estimated two million Hebrews and enslaved tens of thousands more when they tried to obliterate the Hebrewish state and Religion. 228
2.7.3 The Essence of Islam and the Role of Muslims in Slavery and Slave
Though Islam preaches love, the treatment of blacks in Islamic countries left much to be desired. Whether Ethiopians, Zanji, Mawla, Nubians or as Sudanese, blacks have always been treated with scorn in the Arab world. The supposedly curse of Canaan by Noah was embellished in medieval times with tales of miraculous transformations of virtue, so blacks who became white and whites being punished for evil deeds by becoming black.233 Slaves were regarded as greedy, avaricious, base, untrustworthy and impossible to amend. 234, 235 Al-Jahiz, a Muslim scholar writing in the ninth-century, portrays a picture of “cheerful, laughing” creatures with an innate aptitude for “measured and rhythmic dancing, for beating the drum to a regular rhythm”. A derogatory qualification of African slave during his time.236 Another Muslim writer from Basra wrote that “the like of the crow among mankind are the Zanji, for they are the worst of men and the most vicious of creatures in character and temperament”. 237
233 In the ninth century, Wahab Ibn Munabbih related how Ham, the son of Noah had been a handsome white man till God “changed his colour and the colour of his descendants in response to his father’s curse”. See Lewis, Bernard, Islam from the Prophet to the Capture of Constantinople, New York: Harper Torch 1974, II, p. 210. For other interpretations of the curse of Ham, see Muhammad, Akbar, The Image of Africans in Arabic Literature, Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, John Willis, ed., London: F. Cass, 1985, I. pp. 47-75; Isaac, Ephraim, Genesis, Judaism and the Sons of Ham”, 1985, pp. 75-91.
234 According to one Arabic saying, three things interrupted prayer- a donkey, a dog and a mawla. To be called the son of a black woman” was an insult. The prophet Muhammad himself was said to have commented to the Ethiopian-Zanji,
“When he is hungry, he steals, when he is sate, he fornicates”. Although that Hadith may be spurious, the [prophet was also quoted as warning against “bringing black into your pedigree”, for the Zanji is “a distorted creature”. See Lewis, Bernard, Race and Colour in Islam, New York: Harper Torch, 1970, p. 19, pp. 91-92 and Sersen, William John, Stereotypes and Attitudes toward Slaves in Arabic Proverbs: A Preliminary View”, Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, 1985, pp. 92-105.
235 The geographer Ibn Al-Faqih contrasted the “murky, malodors, depraved” blacks with fairer people and attributed their colour to remaining too long in the womb. The tenth century historian Al-Masudi, quoting Galen, listed traits found in blacks: “frizzy hair, thin eyebrows, broad nostrils, thick lips, pointed teeth, smelly skin, black eyes, furrowed hands and great merriment.” Al-masudi’s contemporaries referred to the Zanji as “people distant from the standard of humanity”
and possessing little understanding or intelligence. Said al-Andalusia, an eleventh-century Muslim, judge from Toledo, faulted blacks for lacking self–control and steadiness of mind. A century later, Muhammad Al-Idrisi, writing in his Kitab Rujar, took note of the Zanji’s furrowed feet, stinking sweat and lack of knowledge and defective minds. (in Willis, John, Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa;1985)
236 The thirteenth-century Persian Nasir al-Din Tusi commented that the Zanji differed from animals only in that “their two hands are lifted above the ground”, and “many have observed that the ape is more teachable and more intelligent than the Zanji”. The fourteenth-century Tunisian chronicler Ibn Khadldun wrote: “the only people who accept slavery are the Negroes, owing to their low degree of humanity and their proximity to the animal state”. And in a passage reminiscent of America’s bigoted past, the eleventh-century Baghdad physician Ibn Butlan declared, “if a Zanji were all to fall from heaven to earth, he would beat time as he goes down”; Lewis, B., Race and Colour in Islam, 1871, pp. 34-38, 99; Id.
Slavery in the Middle East, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 46-52.
237 Friedman, Saul S., Jews and the American Slave Trade, 2000, p. 229.
Perhaps, the slavers were amazed that the enslaved who were supposed to be moaning slavery, seemed delighted and cheerful. It takes a philosophical hindsight to evaluating this scene, where sorrow and pain were converted into melancholy and seemingly joy. While the Muslims maintained that Christians and Hebrews kidnapped the African from their ancestral homeland, it must be remembered or rather recalled that it was the Arab Muslims who expanded the African slave trade 700 hundred years before the Portuguese rounded the Bight of Benin.238 The constant demand for pepper, palm oil, ivory, gold and human slaves came from Moors and Turks at a time when feudalism had virtually eliminated the institution from Western Europe and the World. The causes for the enslavement of Africans, particularly by the Europeans, came from the Arabs who spread over Northern Africa in the eighth century.239 No Arab regarded the trade as any more evil than a horse-dealer regards as evil or abnormal the buying or selling of horses.240
The Arabs were the progenitors of commercialised slavery in Africa; they were the procurers and the suppliers. The Arabs had myriads of experience in slave trading before the European entrepreneurs began to make money out of the business and they knew every trick of the trade and how to ambush the Africans. They were also versed in the game of deceit and also to discovering their hiding places.241 The so-called “Afro-Arab Unity”, proclaimed at times by the then OAU and now AU, is a most pernicious hoax played on African culture and history till date. It is a distortion of history and an insult to collective intelligence of Africans to assume that the Arabs played a lesser role in slavery than the European. However, in barbarity of slavery, the Europeans were ceteris paribus (first among equals). 242
238 Lewis, Bernard, Islam from Prophet Muhammad II, Oxford, New York, October 1987, pp. 210-211.
239 On the enslavement of the Gambia, Yoruba, Yorko, Kurnu, Busa, Kutukuli and Bobo people, see Willis, John, Jihad and the ideology of Enslavement, 1985, pp. 16-26; Id. Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa; See also Hiskett, Mervyn, The Image of Slaves in Hausa Literature, 1985. p. 123; Johnston, James, The Mohammnedan’s Slave Trade, Journal of Negro History, XIII, October 1928, pp. 478-491.
240 Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell, American Negro Slavery, New York, 1966, p. 9; Laffin, John, The Arabs as Master Slavers, Englewood, NJ: SRS Publs., 1982, p. 9.
241 Otabil, Kwesi, The Agonistic Imperative: The Rational Burden of Africa-Centeredness, Bristol: Wyndham Hall Press, 1994, p. 79; In his glossary, C. Tsehloane Keto distinguishes between the Christian slave trade of the West and the Muslim in the North and East,1999; Springs, Laurel, The Africa-Centred Perspective of History: An Introduction, NJ: K .A. Publishers, 1990.
242 Friedmann, Saul S., Jews and the American Slave Trade, 2000, pp. 230-236.
The Arabs hegemony in Africa was no less malign to the African World than any other external hegemony. Arab slave trading in Africa began as early as 641 when they arranged to import 360 Nubians per year into Egypt. Berber and Tuarag tribesmen travelled from North Africa to the Souk er rekik (Market) in Timbuktu to purchase slaves. The Bourno people were chained and marched to Kuka near Lake Chad in central Africa. Slave markets were so many in Northern Somalia that the region across the Red Sea from Jiddah to Hodeida in Asir was nicknamed the Cape of Slaves. Between 1860 and 1873 more than four million Africans were peddled by traders in Sudan. In Sudan, the public standing or wealth of an individual was measured by the number of African slaves he possessed.243 Slaves, who were not used on plantations in Sudan, were ultimately shipped to Hegat, Muscat, Oman, Zanzibar, the French Seychelles, Madagascar and India. Others were taken to Tripoli, Tunisia and Zanzibar. In East Africa, female slaves were priced higher than the males, a black African cost less than a mulatto, dark Caucasian or blond in that ascending order.244
The common strategy of the Arabs and the Europeans were to come to African community, settle in a grass-rooted hut from which they flattered the chief with goods and knowledge of Swahili. In exchange for cloths, beads, wine and musket, the chief gave them ivory, then women and finally regular supply of slaves. Over the years, the Arabs and the Arab Muslims became aware of tribal rivalries and through his own-armed band, raided the communities and taking the able-bodied young men and girls. As rightly described by Beachey, “His ruga ruga were his dogs of war, ripe for carnage, revelling in blood”.245 The Arabs provided an ever-hungry market for slaves; they promoted and supported wars between chiefs and the power of their guns obliterated large communities.246 In 1949, a Hausa woman from Nigeria related that “there was always fear of war and enslavement”.247 Commenting in the 1860s, David Livingstone noted how “a dead like silence” hung over depopulated villages.
243 Nwulia, Moses, Britain and Slavery in East Africa, Washington, D. C: Three Continents Press, 1975, p. 64.
244 The economics of slavery are outlined in Manning, Patrick, Slavery and African Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 86-109; and Fisher, Allan and Fisher, Humphrey, Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971, pp. 121-128; See also Klein, Martin and Robertson, Clair (eds.), Women and Slavery in Western Sudan, in Women and Slavery in Africa, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983, p. 67.
245 Beachey, R. W., The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, London: Rex Collins, 1976, p. 184.
246 Farrant, Leda Tippu Tip and the East African Slave Trade, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975.
247 Fisher, Allan and Fisher, Humphrey, Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa, London, 1970, p. 33.
Houses were abandoned, broken by rain or destroyed by free wild animals that roamed farmlands. Corpses could be seen everywhere, including streams where they floated as feast for crocodiles. Captives, who could be pacified with hippo-hide, butts and bayonets were chained or tied together for the march that took three days to three months.
A nineteenth century Bohemian traveller, Ignatius Palme, revealed how slaves (between 300-600 persons) were controlled in a convoy. To avoid flight, a Sheba is hung around the neck of the full-grown slaves: “it consists of a young tree about six to eight feet in length and two inches in thickness, forming a fork in front: this is bound round the neck of the slave so that the stem of the tree presents anteriorly, the fork is closed at the back of the neck by a crossbar and tightened in situ by straps cut from a raw hide; thus the slave, in other to be able to walk, is forced to take the tree in his hands and carry it before him. No individual could however, bear this position for a long length of time and to relieve each other, therefore, the man in front takes the log of his successor on his shoulder and this measure is repeated in succession. It amounts to an impossibility to withdraw the head but the whole neck is always excoriated, an injury leading often to inflammatory action, which occasionally terminates in death”.248
Africans thus, shackled, were unable to sleep at night. They were not allowed to eat and their bodies swelled with oedema. If the heat of the day (about 110 Fahrenheit) did not kill some, then the chill of the night does the job and those whose wounds festered were untreated. A distinction between whites and blacks were obvious, particularly in treatment.249 The Eunuchs priced higher than a normal male at the market and some of the slaves had to be castrated for this purpose. Blacks would have both testicles under pain of death removed; whites, however, would lose only one of his testicles.250 Aware that profit could still be made, even if one of three made it to the market, the traders threw overboard all considerations for human dignity. Mortality and the rape of women were a common feature and in the event of the outbreak of epidemics, like yellow fever, cholera, plaque or small pox, the chained slaves would be left uncared for.251
248 Fairservis, Walter, The Ancient Kingdoms of the Nile, New York: Mentor, 1962, pp. 171-177.
249 Friedman, Saul S., Jews and the American Slave Trade, 2000, p. 231.
250 See Beachey, R. W., The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, London: Rex Collins, 1976, pp. 169-174; Fisher, Allan, Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa, pp.171-177; Friedmann, Saul S., Jews and the American Slave Trade, 2000, p.
231.
251 ibid. Friedman, p. 231.
One British observer from India described in 1873: that “one gang of lads and women, chained together with iron neck rings was in a horrible state, their lower extremities coated with dry mud and their own excrement and torn with thorns, their own bodies were framework and their skeleton limbs tightly stretched over with wrinkled, parchment-like skin”.252 Those who survived the death matches were piled into vessels bound for the island of Zanzibar, twenty–four miles of the coast of East Africa. Those who died or were unlikely to survive were thrown aboard the ship so as to spare the trader of extra tariff on his property. The dead were eaten up by dogs or thrown overboard to drift down with the tide.
And if in their course, they strike the beach and ground, the natives came with a pole and pushed them from the beach and their bodies continue to drift on until another stoppage when they were served in a similar manner.253 Rebels were chained by the neck to the ground out the Caliph Palace, to die exposed to the sun, their only food was a broken gourd filled with gruel, flies and other insects. About twelve years’ old girls were shipped off to harems. 254
After the abolition of slavery and the attempt by the British Royal Navy to stop the trade, 40,000 slaves were imported into the Caliph Port each year, well into the twentieth century. During the reign of Hammed bin Mohammad, about 5,000 Arabs on Zanzibar owned as many as 2,000 slaves each, “the slaves were” stowed in the literal sense of the word in Bulk, the first along the floor of the vessel, two adults side by side, with a boy or girl resting in between or on them until the tier was complete. Over them, the first platform was laid, supported by an inch or two clear of their bodies, thus, the second tier was stowed and so on until they reach above the gunwale of the vessel.255 Those of the lower portion of the cargo that died cannot be removed. They remain until the upper parts were dead and thrown overboard.256 One-tenth of those carried away usually survives until the final destination was reached. Occasionally, some loose their lives, like the 300,000 Zanjis, who lost their lives in Iraq in the 9th century, on account of their rebellion against the inhuman treatments.
252 Fisher and Fisher, Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa, 1970, pp. 91-98.
253 Beachey, Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, London, 1976, pp. 60-61.
254 ibid. pp. 8-11, 17-23, 38-40, 89-92, 121-126; Dowd, Jerome in his Slavery and the Slave Trade in Africa, Journal of Negro History II, January 1917 made the comparison between buying a slave and a horse and concluded, “the sight was sickening”, p. 18.
255 Friedman, Saul S., Jews and the American Slave Trade, 2000, p. 231.
256 Cooper, Frederick, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977, pp.
33-38.
An estimated figure of 12 million Blacks were taken away by the Arabs between 1510 and 1865.257
Many Sheik Kingdoms in the Middle East and in Africa continued to practice slavery even after 1926. An estimate of UNESCO in 1960 stated that about one-sixth of Kounta tribe of Mauritanian was enslaved. And the study of 1965 said that about three-fourth of the Tuaregs of West Africa-some 465,000 people — were under bondage.258 Chattel slavery was legal in Guinea till 1953, in Cameroon and also in Nigeria until the 1960s, Saudi Arabia until 1962, Mauritania until 1980. Arabs of Sudan continue to haunt slaves until today.259 There was slavery in Djibouti, Dubai, Oman and also in modern times. In the year 1972, about 25000 slaves still existed in Saudi Arabia! 260
Anti-Slavery International reported that more than 55 million children (Including shepherds in Sudan, girl domestic in West Africa, under aged textile workers in Turkey, Pakistan and Bangladesh) were slaves.261 In 1992, Africa Watch, a Washington-based research group, reported that about 100,000 slaves were still in Mauritania, a figure confirmed by Newsweek in May of the same year.262 Ironically, slavery persists in some part of the Arab World, however, with a more sophisticated modus operandi. One would have expected that after the manifestation of the horrors of slavery and the intensive relationship between Arabs and Africans as a result of geographical proximity, slavery would have stopped. It appears that the greed to acquiring slaves obviously persists longer than the will to abolish slavery and slave trade.Though, the enslaved enjoyed little or no rights, they were however, accorded privilege of manumission. The primary aim of all slave societies as discussed above was economic motivation. This motive appeared to overwhelm every other consideration. The strategy for buying or kidnapping slaves differs from country to country. However, some countries preferred the combination of buying and kidnapping, while others preferred the subversive-kidnapping-buying methodology.
257 Laffin, John, Arabs as Master Slavers, 1982, p. 34; Beachey estimates that as many as 2 million blacks were taken in the nineteenth century alone. Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, 1982, p. 262; Compare: Friedman, Saul S., Jews and the American Slave Trade 2000, p. 300.
258 Derrick, Jonathan, Africa’s Slaves today, New York: Schocken Press, 1975, p. 32-63.
259 Id. p. 56.
260 Rosenberg, Andrea, The Middle East Slave Trade, Middle East Review Winter 1976/77, IX, pp. 58-62.
261 Friedman, Saul S., Jews and the American Slave Trade, 2000, p. 234.
262 Newsweek (May 4, 1992), CXIX, pp. 32ff.